Town ponders connections to state trails

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. » Town officials are reviewing potential connections to state trails as part of efforts to resolve traffic congestion and a parking shortage in the Woodstock business district.

Grace Murphy, chairwoman of the town’s Complete Streets Committee, said during a Town Board meeting this week that area rail trails have proven popular.

“We already have a lot of Woodstock residents using the Ashokan Rail Trail and they have to get into their cars to do that,” she said. “What we’d like to do is work on things to link it so that people would not have to get [in] a car. You could use a bike ... to get from one path to another and to get from the [center of town] to the regional path.”

Committee member Rahm Rechtschaffen said existing trails could be connected by making roads safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.

“Examples of the type of trails we’re looking at [would be] a trail connecting the hamlet of Woodstock and the hamlet of Bearsville so that people don’t have to walk on [Route] 212,” he said.

Councilman Lorin Rose said there are unofficial trail systems in the town but people have been discouraged from using them.

“There was a trail that went from town all the way up to Bearsville,” he said.

“It came out along Sawkill, and it came out ... into the Rick Volz Field,” Rose said. “But that was in the days that people weren’t afraid that if somebody crossed their property, they were going fall down, get hurt and sue them.”

Committee member Kevin Smith said there are several possibilities for connections utilizing historic trails.

“The Overlook Trail is ... on state land,” he said. “That’s an old trail over Bluestone Wild Forest. Through a lot of hard work over many, many years ... there’s 28 miles of multiuse trails that connect all the way from the town of Kingston ... and go all the way over to Onteora Lake.”